Ghost Fish: An interview with Stuart Pennebaker (MFA ‘23) on her debut novel

Interview by LIT Books Editor Jonathan Kesh

Like plenty of great ghost stories, Stuart Pennebaker’s debut novel Ghost Fish begins as an extremely grounded tale. That it continues to feel realistic in its natural, interior way, even when a spirit entrenches itself into the story, is what makes it especially unique.

Ghost Fish follows a young twenty-something named Alison, who recently arrived in New York in hopes of a fresh start after a series of family tragedies left her isolated and entirely on her own. In particular, Alison is heavy with memories of her nearly twin sister — they were almost a year apart, but it didn’t feel that way — who had passed not many years ago. Like many transplants to New York soon discover, it can be a harsh, impersonal city: without family or friends, Alison’s struggles with isolation get worse, until one night, a tiny specter flies into her apartment alongside her. It’s a ghost, in the shape of a fish, and it’s absolutely her sister for reasons which Alison can’t place but cannot bring herself to doubt. Soon, the ghost fish is living in Alison’s room inside a pickle jar filled with water, and Alison begins to feel as though she’s got her sister back.

While certainly a tale involving grief, it’s in many ways a story about loneliness. Instead of being frightening, the ghost here is a lifeline, a source of love and connection keeping Alison afloat as she navigates bad relationships and an unsteady restaurant job in a strange city. But, as many transplants to New York eventually discover, there are communities and good people hidden among the crowds. As Alison meets somebody who could help her move forward, she — and the novel itself — meditate on whether a ghost can be a lifeline for grief, or an anchor weighing you down and keeping you away from the world of the living.

Stuart Pennebaker’s Ghost Fish comes out on August 5th, 2025 from Little, Brown and Company. Before its publication, Pennebaker sat down with LIT to talk about ghosts.

LIT: When you first started working on Ghost Fish, what was your vision for what the story was going to be?

Stuart Pennebaker: I was working on something much, much different before I came to The New School, and then during, and it just wasn’t working. I got some feedback that was ultimately really good and helpful but was hard to hear at at the time: that what I thought was going to be my first novel was reading more like notes for a novel than an actual contained story.

And so I put that away. I decided I wanted to work on something that’s fun, about a world I know well. I hadn’t been living in New York for very long then, and I was reading lots of food writers at the time, like Ruth Reichl, M.F.K. Fisher, Anthony Bourdain, all those people. I was working at yet another restaurant— like most writers I have worked lots of food and bev jobs in lots of restaurants but I can’t cook, and I have a terrible memory. So I only ever was a host. I decided, I’m going to write the host book — that’s what I want to do. I want to write a book about a woman who is a host in a restaurant. I thought it would just be a fun way to explore characters. I didn’t really know if it would be anything, and I was having fun exploring the character and the setting, but it still just wasn’t quite clicking. The thing about being a host in a restaurant is that it can be a boring job. It’s a lot of folding napkins, walking people to seats, and you’re not in the kitchen or interacting with the guests as much as the servers.

So the story needed something else, and I was on one of those walks, going around the block, banging my head against the wall, not sure if I was going to make a story ever feel like a big enough world for a novel. I don’t really know where the idea came from, but I wrote it in the story exactly how I felt it: I was living in the East Village at the time and walking back to my apartment, and I just saw this glint in the air. It was the afternoon, and I was like, “that kind of looks like a weird shadow or a ghost,” and I knew that my main character had a sister that she had lost. I decided the sister needs to come back and needs to have more of a presence in this novel.

Nothing like that has happened to me before or since. I wish it would, but I saw the whole thing, I knew the sister was a fish, I knew she would be there for Alison as she is navigating this new city and having these complicated relationships. So that is a very long answer to your question, but it started as what I thought would be my restaurant novel, and then turned into this weird ghost story.

LIT: It sounds like this began as a much more grounded novel, and then the speculative element came in later. How much did you get done on the book before you added that ghost in?

SP: I was not super far in. Probably, I don’t know, maybe twenty percent of what’s there now. Not not that far in at all. I had never written anything very speculative before. I’ve toyed with speculative stuff since, but it kind of surprised me, which was fun. I think that’s the best feeling as a writer, to feel surprised.

LIT: Beyond the fish itself, there’s a lot of recurring aquatic motifs, with the ocean being especially important, but it’s all built around this fish. How did you decide on using a fish as a main device to drive the story?

SP: In my memory of it, I remember having that weird afternoon where I’d just had that realization. It sounds a little woo-woo, but I felt like I didn’t choose the fish, I just kind of stumbled upon it. Then I was just playing with it, I wasn’t sure if it was going to work. I’m not an outliner, my draft is kind of my outline. So I thought maybe, it would be something I used to get a little bit further in the draft, and then it would come out. I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do with the fish.

But then later that summer, my boyfriend was re-reading As I Lay Dying by Faulkner, and there’s a chapter where the only words are, “My mother is a fish.” And it felt like a weird kind of serendipity. I had read the book in high school, but I hadn’t thought about that in forever.

Then I thought, what would that look like, if a character lost someone very close to them and then they literally turned into a fish? It seemed kind of like an interesting puzzle to try to solve. And the fun thing about a ghost, is that you then get to come up with all the rules of the ghost. Will it talk? Will it not talk? Does the ghost want to be there? Where does the ghost come from? Where will it go after? So I turned the story into a puzzle for me to solve.

I don’t think Alison realizes how mired in grief she is until the ghost comes back. I thought this was an important way that her grief manifests outside of her. So once the fish appeared, or the ghost fish, I suppose, it was hard to see the story without it.

LIT: While Alison speaks directly to the reader in this very close narration, her sister is the opposite. In her ghost form, she communicates mostly non-verbally, with Alison often interpreting her reactions. How did you build up that character of the sister with those kinds of limitations?

SP: I tried a bunch of different things. I thought that the ghost fish sister would speak. The dialogue was really fun to write for all the other characters, and all of their dialogue came a little more easily. With the fish, the dialogue just wasn’t quite working, and the fish didn’t talk a lot. Either the sister needed to be a huge voice, or more of a reflection. My agent and I had a big conversation about this, and we just couldn’t quite get the dialogue between Alison and her sister to feel real.

We worked on editing the book together. And when we were doing that, we decided to play around with taking all of the fish’s dialogue out. Once we did that, I realized it was just the most obvious choice. If you have a sister or a brother or sibling that you’re close to, you can have this weird unspoken language. Having the fish not be a living, breathing, able-to-speak, able-to-walk-on-its-own creature helped me show that in the way I wanted to. It also helped maintain some ambiguity I wanted the ghost to have. Like, I wanted the reader to wonder, is the ghost real? Is the ghost Alison struggling with her grief? It was an interesting way to play with that.

LIT: The story takes this approach to the speculative, which I personally am a big fan of, where it’s never established firmly whether or not the ghost is real or imagined. So I won’t ask whether the ghost is actually real or not, because that feels like it’s unimportant to the work.

SP: That’s so nice to hear you say. Yeah, I know that this book is going to drive some people absolutely batty, and I know that, with the not-knowing, some people like and some people don’t like it. I’m glad that you feel like it wasn’t even important.

LIT: So while you were writing, how did you balance that speculative element, and keep it from stepping into one side or the other too much?

SP: Alison’s job in the restaurant really helps with that. Working in a restaurant is such a physical and demanding job. You’re making sure other people are having a nice day. You’re on your feet. You’re running around. Having Alison live in that world where she’s working really hard, she’s meeting all these new people, she’s very, very tired, and she’s pretty broke — all of that was able to create a world which felt real in some sense, to balance out the speculative element. The roommates too, were a way to create a little bit of contrast. Just to be surrounded by strangers is such a weird feeling that a lot of us who have roommates in big cities are probably familiar with.

But it makes you so aware of your person and and things you put in the fridge, and where you keep your towel after you take a shower and all of that mundane but important day-to-day stuff. So thinking about that, and then also having this purely imagined creature — there was some tension there that felt fun to explore.

LIT: I’ve asked about the ghost a lot, and I wanted to talk about the protagonist too. Alison’s isolation is a major part of the story, and a line that comes up more than once when she sees someone she could potentially connect with is, “I didn’t know which I wanted more, to be her or to know her.” What is Alison looking for in those connections with other people?

SP: I love that you used the word isolation. That is really, I think, what the heart of the story was for me. In everything that I have written or tried to write before this and since, I always seem to come back to loneliness and and alienation, and characters who feel like they just haven’t quite found the shape of the world that fits them.

What she’s looking for is very simple, but it feels so far away that she complicates it for herself so much. She just wants to be understood and surrounded. She’s lost many people that she loved in dramatic fashions at a really young age, and once you find yourself alone, it can be a hole that’s hard to to crawl out of.

LIT: If that’s what she’s looking for, is that what Allison actually needs? Is it what you were trying to drive her toward while you were writing?

SP: I hope by the end of the book, that you start to understand that what she really needed all along was was to see and understand herself, and that she is enough for herself. And once she’s enough for herself, she will be enough for other people as well. That sounds a lot more sentimental than I meant it to, but it’s hard not to be sentimental about loneliness.

LIT: Now that this book is close to its release, is there anything else you’re working on right now?

SP: I am working on two things right now. One is a novel that’s more set in the South, which has has been really fun. I grew up in South Carolina, so it’s fun to be back there and exploring that. I’m not quite sure what is happening in that novel yet, but this Greek chorus is starting to sneak into it. I’ve never written from the first person plural, so that’s been fun to experiment with.

Also, I started research on a project that’s set in the in the music scene in the sixties, starting to creep into the seventies. I cannot carry a tune in a bucket and was not alive, unfortunately, in the sixties and seventies. It’s requiring quite a bit of research, and the New York Public Library has a rare books archive, I went for first the time last Saturday, which was so much fun. I thought I was going to get the research for that book done by the end of last year, and I think it’s going to take way, way longer than I was expecting. But it’s fun to have a research project, and I like having two things going at once, so we’ll see what happens.

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